On October 9, 1997, Menton was awarded the Orden Miguel Angel Asturias in Guatemala's Palacio Nacional. Previously he received the Orden Andrés Bello (1991) and the Orden Francisco de Miranda (1996) in Caracas. He was also honored by the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores en Monterrey, Mexico (1994). He has taught, lectured or given conference papers in almost every Latin American country and Spain.

Menton has taught at U.C.I. since 1965 and was the founding chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and later of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He previously taught at Dartmouth College (1952-1954) and the University of Kansas (1954-1965). He holds a B.A. from City College of New York (1948), an M.A. from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1949), and a Ph.D. from New York University.

Since retiring officially in June 1994, Menton has taught at least one graduate or upper-division course every year and has continued his research in Latin American fiction.

Saga de México. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955, 245 pp. The new revised and updated edition of this second-year college reader, in collaboration with María Herrera Sobek, was published by the Bilingual Press in early 1992.

Juan José Arreola and the Twentieth-Century Short Story. Read at the M.L.A. meeting in Madison, Wisc., Sept. 1957, and later published in Hispania, XLII, 3 (Sept. 1959), 295-308. Republished in Spanish in Iberoamérica (Mexico City: Studium, 1962), a collection of the best Hispania articles on Latin America, and by the Casa de las Américas in Havana, 1963. Arreola later dedicated the first part of his Confabulario total to me.

The Last of the Just: Between Borges and García Márquez. World Literature Today, LIX, 4 (Autumn 1985), 517-524. Lecture: Puterbaugh Conference, University of Oklahoma, April 19, 1985; U.C. Berkeley, May 1986.